Originally Posted by
msu2001la
You know they can just press a little button on their radio and be off and riding on an identical spare bike in a matter of seconds, right? Pro bike racing seems like one of the few situations where shaving grams at the expense of durability makes sense. They don't need bikes that survive crashing. They have a whole car full of spare bikes, parts and mechanics that follow them around.
I would agree with this if it wasn’t for the now pretty conservative UCI minimum weight. Without that restriction they would go a fair bit lighter. So now we have non-race bikes like the Aethos coming in well under the minimum race weight.
As long as you don’t crash at 65 kph and have half a dozen other riders slam into your bike it should be durable enough. The only thing with carbon is that it isn’t very tolerant of being loaded in the wrong direction. So for example stamping on a thin carbon seatstay is likely to break it, while a steel one would probably be okay.